Percentage of U.S. Republicans who say they could not live on the minimum wage : 69

Who support raising it : 37

Minimum number of times since 2011 that members of Congress have accidentally cast the wrong vote : 120

Amount the federal government has budgeted this year for IT maintenance : $58,400,000,000

Percentage of federal agencies whose servers have failed in the past twelve months : 94

Value of a cloud-computing contract awarded by the CIA to Amazon last year : $600,000,000

Estimated number of customers whose data was stolen from Amazon subsidiary Zappos in 2012 : 24,000,000

Number of attempted cyberattacks the average global company experienced in 2013 : 16,856

Amount by which spending on mobile ads is projected to exceed that on newspaper ads this year : $1,000,000,000

Chance that a U.S. newspaper has a statehouse reporter : 1 in 3

Estimated amount of taxes and fees that Colorado has collected from the marijuana industry since legalization : $34,800,000

That Texas collects from undocumented workers each year : $1,608,534,000

Amount Texas has allocated for a three-month deployment of National Guard officers to the border : $38,000,000

Percentage of U.S. counties in which the proportion of racial minorities has grown since 2010 : 94

Percentage change in the proportion of racial minorities in Washington, D.C., since then : –0.8

Percentage of Newark, New Jersey, residents who are black : 54

Of pedestrians stopped by Newark police who are : 81

Portion of Newark police stops that are “legally unjustified” according to a Department of Justice study : 3/4

Percentage by which a black drug-misdemeanor defendant in Manhattan is more likely than a white one to be sent to prison : 15

Factor by which a person in Nevada is more likely than one in Massachusetts to be the target of a federal wiretap : 30

Percentage of Americans who said they were satisfied with their freedom to choose what to do with their lives in 2006 : 91

Percentage who say so today : 79

Number of U.S. states in which workers are not guaranteed paid parental leave : 47

Number of the world’s twenty other wealthiest nations in which they are not : 0

Age at which a female worker in Britain reaches peak earning power : 34

At which a male worker does : 50

Estimated number of women worldwide who were married before the age of 15 : 250,000,000

Number of countries that require their rulers to belong to a particular religion : 30

Percentage by which Americans overreport their religious attendance when asked over telephone rather than online : 13

Portion of Mormon missionaries expected to travel with specially configured iPads by 2015 : 1/3

Minimum number of churches in China demolished or given demolition notices by government order since February : 163

Estimated number of people executed by all countries other than China in 2012 : 682

By China : 3,000

Estimated portion of the past 100 executed U.S. prisoners who suffered from intellectual disabilties : 1/3

Minimum amount paid by the Museum of Death in Hollywood for Jack Kevorkian’s Thanatron suicide device : $25,000

Estimated height in feet of a memorial tree planted for George Harrison that died in July after an attack by beetles : 15

Estimated annual cost of invasive animal, plant, and microbe species to the U.S. economy : $120,000,000,000

Amount Americans spent last year on UNICEF donations to trick-or-treaters : $3,731,057

On Halloween costumes for their pets : $330,000,000

Figures cited are the latest available as of August 2014.

“Harper’s Index” is a registered trademark.

October Index Sources

1,2 Public Policy Polling (Raleigh, N.C.)
3 New York Times/Harper’s research
4 Office of Management and Budget (Washington)
5 MeriTalk (Alexandria, Va.)
6 U.S. Government Accountability Office
7 Zappos.com (Las Vegas)
8 IBM Security Systems Division (Waltham, Mass.)
9 eMarketer Inc. (N.Y.C.)
10 Pew Research Center (Washington)
11 Colorado Department of Revenue (Denver)
12 Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (Washington)
13 Texas Comptroller’s Office (Austin)
14,15 Pew Charitable Trusts (Washington)
16–18 U.S. Department of Justice
19 Vera Institute of Justice (N.Y.C.)
20 Harper’s research
21,22 Gallup (Washington)
23 National Conference of State Legislatures (Denver)
24 International Labour Organization (Geneva)
25,26 Office for National Statistics (London)
27 UNICEF (N.Y.C.)
28 Pew Research Center (Washington)
29 Public Religion Research Institute (Washington)
30 The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City)
31 China Aid (Midland, Tex.)
32 Amnesty International (London)
33 Dui Hua Foundation (San Francisco)
34 Rob Smith, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
35 Gallerie Sparta (West Hollywood, Calif.)
36 Los Angeles Department of Parks and Recreation
37 David Pimentel, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Cornell University (Ithaca, N.Y.)
38 UNICEF (N.Y.C.)
39 National Retail Federation (Washington)